Grease Monkey Jive Read Online Free PDF Page A

mate,” said Jimmy.
    “If it’s so easy, Dad, you do it.” Dan let a shifter clatter to the cement floor of the workshop in his irritation.
    “Sounds like he’s shitty,” said Jimmy.
    “Sounds like you’ve been drinking, Dad.”
    “Don’t pick on your old man.”
    Dan rolled out from beneath the Mini to look at his father. “It’s not even lunchtime and you’re already three sheets to the wind.”
    “What’s it to you, boy? I’m not working. It’s the weekend.”
    “I’m working and having you both stand over me isn’t helping.”
    “Don’t make him more shitty, Jimbo. It’ll slow him up,” said Kevin.
    Jimmy just grunted, glared at his son, and made for the driveway.
    “Dad, did you drive here? Kev, did you let him drive?” Dan scrambled to his feet to catch his father already behind the wheel of his old Commodore, revving the engine.
    “He’s alright, Danny boy,” said Kev.
    “Argh,” said Dan, frowning at Kev, pushing his hair back from his face, and leaving a streak of black gritty grease on his forehead. Jimmy was a pig-headed son-of-a-bitch at the best of times, but his drinking and driving was seriously stupid, a disaster waiting to happen in a family already wrenched apart by alcohol and speed. He walked over to the Commodore and reefed the driver’s side door open. “Get out. You’re not driving.”
    “I’ll do what I bloody well want.”
    Dan’s breath was coming in tight exhalations through his open mouth. He kept his hand on the top edge of the door when Jimmy reached for the handle to pull it closed.
    “Let go.”
    “You’re on two strikes, Dad. Get out of the car.”
    They eyed each other through the dirty window of the Commodore – stalemate. They’d been here before, more than once.
    “Fellas, settle down,” said Kev, coming around the side of the car. Both his younger brother and his nephew ignored him. “How about I drive?”
    “That’d be good, Kev,” said Dan, not taking his eyes off his father’s face. If Jimmy got pulled over drink driving one more time, he’d lose his license and his job.
    Jimmy didn’t move, not the flicker of an eyelid, his grip on the door steely, then he broke eye contact and stomped his boot down on the accelerator, making the engine rev.
    “He’s alright, Danny,” said Kev, going around to the passenger side and getting in the car.
    Defeated, Dan took his hand off the door and without attempting to shut it, Jimmy reversed hard out of the driveway, the door slamming from the motion of the car as it shot forward into the street. That was so Jimmy, gruff, stubborn, careless, and a hot-head by nature, then mean, stupid, and ugly when drinking.
    And helpless when it came to raising a kid.
    Dan could see that now with all the wisdom of his twenty-eight years. He could summon a degree of sympathy for this man who had never prepared to be a single dad. But not today. Not with the drinking. Today it was too easy to recall the skin crawling fear and bottomless hatred he’d felt as a nine year old when he’d first learned he was Jimmy’s son.
    Mostly he remembered the beatings, but the hatred was stiffened into something rock hard by the neglect. No other kid at school made his own dinner and washed his own clothes. No other kid paid the electricity bill, cleaned the bathroom, and did the grocery shopping.
    But it was just as well he’d learned to do all that because by the time Dan was fourteen, Jimmy was driving long haul trucks and only home intermittently. They had more money so there were more toys around, big screen TVs and stereo units with woofers and tweeters, and there were fewer girlfriends, which meant less embarrassment at breakfast. But the flat was hardly ever clean, and they both ate too much food from cans and cartons.
    By the time Dan was fifteen, people started to say, “You’re so much like your dad,” and he determined he would find a way to be nothing like him.
    Now the two of them existed in a circuit of